Riviera's Best Films of 2008

I saw more than 300 new films this year: in the cinema during a film's theatrical release but also at press screenings, outdoor cinemas, in airplanes, at festivals, at home and in one particular case, in a pole dancing studio. Lists are silly, and obsessive listmaking such as this borders on the pathological, but indulge me - this is the silly season after all.

RIVIERA'S BEST OF 2008

1. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
2. Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK)
3. The Secret of the Grain, Abdel Kechiche, France)
4. Genova (Michael Winterbottom, UK)
5. Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)
6. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)
7. Three Blind Mice (Matthew Newton, Australia)
8. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan)
9. Everything Is Fine (Yves-Christian Fournier, Canada)
10. Let The Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

The next 33 (in no particular order) are 3 star-and-above titles: Wall-E, Margot at the Wedding, Silent Light, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Out of the Blue, Vicky Christina Barcelona, The Dark Knight, Me and Orson Welles, Towelhead, Adoration, Grindhouse, The Chaser, Boy A, Pontypool, Slumdog Millionaire, In Bruges, Savage Grace, Lake Tahoe, Reprise, Stop-Loss, Lust Caution, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, Elegy, Summer Hours, Only, Quantum of Solace, Otto; or Up with Dead People, Elegy, Gran Torino, Funny Games, Persepolis, Australia, The Man From London, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

These films which in some countries came out in 2008 don't make it into the list because I saw them in 2007: Flight of the red Balloon, My Winnipeg, Paranoid Park, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, Still Life, You, The Living, Mister Lonely, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days...

These might've made it into the top list, but I haven't seen them yet (Sydney aint't exactly one of the five buroughs): Ballast, La Belle Personne, Mesrine: Ennemi Public Numero 1, Wendy And Lucy, Doubt, Revolutionary Road, The Reader, The Headless Woman, 35 Shots of Rum, RR, The Class, The Changeling, Three Monkeys, Frontier of Dawn, Che, Still Walking, Rachel Getting Married, Liverpool, The Hurt Locker, Il Divo, Tulpan, Milk, United Red Army, 24 City, Two Lovers, The Wrestler, Martyrs...

Top 5 documentaries

1. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts (Scott Hicks, Australia)
   
2. Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog,
   
3. Man on Wire (James Marsh, UK)
   
4. When the Levees Broke: a Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee, USA)
   
5. Every Little Step (del Deo & Stern, USA)

The next five: Examined Life, This Film is not yet Rated, In The Shadow of the Moon, Planet B-Boy, About a Son.

Best Cinema of 2008

• Best Film: A Christmas Tale - Kings and Queens, an accomplished multi-layered, quasi-mythological take on family relations became my favourite French film of all time. Turns out it was only a teaser for Desplechin's true masterpiece. This, my friends, is cinema.
  
• Best Director: Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale)
  
• Best Original Screenplay: Arnaud Desplechin & Emmanuel Bourdieu (A Christmas Tale)
  
• Best Adapted Screenplay: Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Gianni Di Gregorio, Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso & Roberto Saviano (Gomorrah) - Like being there. Like being there and fearing for one's life. Like being there but, unlike every other person caught in the intricate net of organized crime a la napolitana, seeing the bigger picture. Astounding.
  

• Best Actor: Michael Fassbender (Hunger) - In a year full of great male performances, it was this one which made me think long and hard about the work of an actor, and what that work looks like when it's done right.
  
• Best Actress: Kristin Scott Thomas (I've Loved You So Long) - When she acts in French, Scott Thomas seems liberated, free from expectations and affectations. It's as if she'd shed a layer of skin: her raw performance here is all the more impressive because she plays against type.
  
• Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) - His best performance, in a career which had the potential for many more, was his last one. This'll stick in my head for years: the shot of the Joker sticking his head out of a speeding police car window, hair flying in the wind, eyes lit up like those of a mad dog, Gotham lights flickering frenziedly in the background.
  
• Best Supporting Actress: Rebecca Hall (Vicky Christina Barcelona) - In a film featuring some the most celebrated, lusted after young women in cinema, this relative newcomer not only held her own (she's not even on the poster!) but stole several scenes from her top-billed costars.
  

• Best Cinematography: Marcel Zyskind (Genova) - luminous, dangerous, heartbreaking.
  
• Best Original Score: Alexandre Desplat (Lust, Caution) - Throws caution to the wind: lustful melancholy at its best.
  
• Best Special Effects: the team behind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Special effects should serve the story, and they do so beautifully here. Knowing when to impress and when to take a step back and let the actors take over, these special effects take two of the most handsome actors in Hollywood and give them new sets of bodies to play with.
• Best Short Film: Crazy in Love (part 1 of The Signal) - David Bruckner tied with The Brazilian - Sook-yin Lee (part 2 of Toronto Stories). One's about zombies, the other's about autistic love, both are well worth a gander.
  

Best Opening Credit Sequence: The Dog Problem (Howard Nourmand, Grand Jete). It's fun, it's witty and it's nice to look at, just like the film it introduces.

Best Use of a Song: Massive Attack's Herculaneum over the end credits of Gomorrah. If I remember correctly there is no music at all in this superb, suspenseful dissection of the inner-workings of organized crime in Napoli. The narrative in Matteo Garrone's film moves forward by slowly stacking layer upon layer of a brutal truth which all but suffocates the characters, eventually trapping them in a prison of their own making and leaving the audience gasping for air. At which point Massive Attack's dark, merciless instrumental kicks in, its bass-heavy rumblings threatening to bring down the theatre, which after three hours of a cinema so intense and unrelentingly visceral, almost feels like relief.

Best Song: Gran Torino, sung by Clint Eastwood over the end credits of Gran Torino, if only because its bittersweet, corny melody is the only theme possible for a film both profound and utterly over-the-top.

Best Poster. The spare, confronting and beautiful poster for I've Loved You So Long made we want to see and like this film. If Kristin Scott Thomas wins an Oscar this year, she'd be smart to thank the designer for this deceptively simple key art. Runner up spots for Mister Lonely (Jeremy Saunders' version) and Ignition's poster for Vicky Christina Barcelona (even though it all but impossible to find Woody Allen's name in the picture). As for the worst, it just has to be the floating heads of Nothing But The Truth.



Best Blog. David Hudson's Green Cine Daily is to film criticism what the best film festivals are to good cinema: a carefully curated showcase of the works of talented individuals passionate about the medium, and a prism through which to look differently at what's around us. Every morning I look forward to the moment when, between sips of coffee, I get to check out what happened overnight -David blogs from Berlin - in (the) world (of) cinema. David's writing is moving to IFC in a few days, and I look forward to where it takes us (read David Hudson's farewell post).

Best Review: Manohla Dargis on Gran Torino for the New York Times. In a year where film criticism has come under fire in more ways than one, it's good to remember that good film criticism is first and foremost good writing. A special mention to the Village Voice's Nathan Lee, whose clever and hilarious review of Cloverfield made me smile all the way to the videoshop.

I think my favourite quote of the year is Manohla Dargis on Iron Man, on the phone to the Carpetbagger: "There's not enough filmmaking in that film for me to be interested in it". It's almost as deadly as what must be the line of the year: "You unpatriotic little cunt, you're gonna walk right off the plank into the bowels of hell." (hissed at Kate Beckingsale's character by the great Vera Famiga in Nothing But The Truth).

10 moments of cinema which I can't (and won't) get out of my head

1. Jean-Claude Van Damme's lengthy, desperate monologue, delivered to camera in meta-thriller JCVD. It's ironic that it takes an actor playing themselves to remind us that we never really know what an actor is capable of until they show us.
   
2. The opening sunrise and closing sunset of Silent Light. The shot is so beautiful, mysterious and magical it made me hold my breath. After a while I stopped holding my breath though, which is a good thing as the shot lasts a full 5 minutes.
   
3. The 20 min dialogue scene between Bobby Sands and the priest at the centre of Hunger. In my memory, it's a single take. And these men, they just blow you away: as actors, as characters, as people who feel things in black and white, but think in all shades of gray.
   
4. The sounds of Bruce Lee's kung fu fighting over a black screen in Lake Tahoe. Staring at that dark screen - cinema, annuled - I felt my love of the medium, for its super-powers and its wonderfully diverse, vibrant history, well up in me and travel up from my gut to my heart, to my brain and eventually to my tear ducts.
   
5. Kiwi stunt woman Zoe Bell hanging on for dear life on the hood of a 1970 Dodge Challenger in Death Proof. Who does that? How is it even possible?
6. Francois Cluzet crossing the peripherique in Tell No One's gripping chase sequence. Who does that? How is it possible?
   
7. The rain soaked, confused and dangerous car chase in We Own The Night.
   
8. Hafsia Herzi's feverish, never ending belly dance in The Secret of the Grain. Remarkable in not least for its sensuality in a year (a time?) when sensuality has virtually disappeared from the cinema.
   
9. The superb shot of great white shark leaping out of the water to chomp on a seal, stretched out from four seconds to over a minute in Earth, thanks to the most advanced of high-definition cameras. A spectacle ordinarily so short-lived that even had we been there to see it (leisurely boating meters away from the ocean's largest predator) our eyes and brain would have been unable to properly process it. Jaw-dropping.
   
10. The witty and hilarious running joke of a house permanently on fire in Synecdoche, NY. Oh yeah. I've been there.
    

PS: someone please give these 10 actors under 30 some good material!

1. Hafsia Herzi (The Secret of the Grain) - The mix of innocence and sensuality is effortless for this actress (Summer Bishil does a good job too in Towelhead), but here she takes her character far beyond mere Lolita.

2. Ahney Her (Gran Torino) - it can't be easy standing up to Clint Eastwood but this young actress charmed her way the old codger's heart - and our own. 

3. Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood) - It takes someone special to make the scenery chewing Daniel Day-Lewis know that his bark is worse than his bite.

4. and 5. Lina Leandersson and Kåre Hedebrant(Let The Right One In) - imagine asking a kid to come across as a wary, androgynous, ageless vampire. Now imagine that kid doing just that. Meanwhile the human half of this ambiguous, pre-pubescent couple was as creepy as his vampire counterpart. Robert Pattison eat your heart out.
6. Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) - He was great in controversial UK series Skins. In Danny Boyle's feel-good rags-to-riches drama, he's sympathetic, charismatic and entirely believable.
7. Willa Holland (Genova) - she's great as a girl dangerously perched on the brink of adulthood while mourning the death of her mother.

8. Brendan Walters (Australia) - he stole the show, which in this case included mighty abs, grand landscapes and 10,000 head of cattle.
9. and 10. Maxime Dumontier and Chloe Bourgeois (Everything Is Fine) - their naturalistic acting seemed to capture the very essence of adolescence.

The last film I saw was The Curious Case of Benjmain Button, earlier today. If I can take one image with me from this past year in film, it'll be Benjamin and Daisy sailing around the Florida Keys in 1962, a space shuttle taking off in the background, an optimistic image of beauty and magic to take cinema into the new year.

Riviera's Best Films of 2008